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Friday, May 1, 2015
Vol.7 • Issue 87
Authors take over Otter Books See Page 14
SAM MCBRIDE Special to the Nelson Star on’t ever ask Mrs. McPhail about the Frank Slide!” That was the warning my mother Dee Dee gave me as I left valhallapathrealty@telus.net home to walk a half mile to Marion www.valhallapathrealty.com McPhail’s house at 808 Carbonate St. for my first piano lesson with her. Earlier that day my father Leigh and grandmother Helen separately told me not to mention the Frank Slide in Mrs. McPhail’s presence. It was September 1960 and I was an eight-year-old apprehensive about what was going on. I remember finding it hard to imagine the large, red-haired lady with hornBaker Street rimmed glasses in her 60s as the baby who miraculously survived unhurt after MAY 2015 Turtle Mountain crashed down on the coal-mining town of Frank in 1903. The story I heard from family and For more information visit www.freshtracksexpress.com friends was that everyone in Frank exor call 250-354-4944 cept Baby Marion died in the Frank Slide. The topic would inevitably come up in our annual drives from Nelson F F O 0% through the Crowsnest Pass to visit relaUP TOORE5 SPECIALS IN-ST tives in Alberta. Someone would always comment on the enormous boulders on each side of the road, and that bodies of victims of the slide — perhaps Mrs. McPhail’s relatives — were entombed directly below us. I learned later that Marion’s older sisters Jessie and May Leitch also survived the slide, as did about 90 per cent Lessons • Retail Custom • Repairs of the residents of Frank, as their homes safely away from the slide path. 250.352.1157 were Th e Baby-Marion-As-Sole-Survivor Tues. - Sat.: 9:00 - 4:00 story was one of several myths about the 601-D Front St. Emporium Frank Slide that would bother Marion for the rest of her life. HAPPY NEW YEAR! For her, the most annoying nonsense was The Ballad of Frankie Slide, a simple In-store Specials! rhyme of unknown origin that told of the little baby discovered alone on a pile of straw with no identification, “so they called her Frankie Slide.” The line about calling the baby Frankie Slide was used again in the Stompin’ Tom Connors 1968 song How the Mountain Came Down. As it turned out, I managed to get through four years of weekly piano lessons with Marion without ever mentioning the Frank Slide. However, it
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Marion McPhail, date unknown. Her claim to fame as the youngest survivor of the Frank Slide brought her no joy. Courtesy Provincial Archives of Alberta, PR2008.0058/11
The Nelson woman who HATED being famous Marion McPhail survived one of Canada’s deadliest disasters, but disliked the notoriety it brought her instilled a curiosity in me that continues to this day, almost 40 years after she died in Victoria at age 76. In recent years, I have visited the Frank Slide interpretive centre several times and corresponded with their staff and fellow researchers. Most of their information on Marion and the extended Leitch family came from Marion’s daughter Sheilah, who was driving by in September 2003 and decided to visit
the interpretive centre. She provided a wealth of information on the Leitch family and what really happened to them in the Frank Slide and after.
Mountain collapses Marion’s parents Alexander and Rosemary Leitch were born in Quebec and settled in the late 1880s in Manitoba where Alex joined his three
brothers in flour milling at Oak Lake. By 1899 Alex had moved to Killarney, Manitoba where he operated a grain elevator. Government records show Marion Moore Leitch was born Dec. 29, 1900 in Killarney in the sub-district of Turtle Mountain — ironically the same name as the mountain in the southwest corner of the future province of Alberta that would collapse into the Frank Slide at 4:10 a.m. on April 29, 1903. In 1901, after the Killarney grain elevator burned down, Alex bought a general store in Blairmore. A year later, after bringing his family from Manitoba, he saw that the new town of Frank just a few miles away was booming, so they moved there and established the Leitch General Store. He bought a cabin and renovated it for his large family. They were a musical family who regularly gathered around the piano to sing songs. “We had brought a great many books with us, and were a happy, congenial family,” Jessie Bryan wrote in a 1950 Winnipeg Free Press article on the Frank Slide. Jessie, age 15 in 1903, wrote: “Falling asleep on that quiet, moonlit night, I awoke to the sound of a rumbling roar transcending description.” She and sister May, 10, were unhurt because the iron frame of their bed shielded them from the weight of debris from above. Ironically, one of the first rescuers on the scene was Rev. Andrew MacPhail, the same name (though with different spelling) as Larry McPhail who Marion married in Nelson 24 years later. “Someone heard a baby crying nearby, and found the infant daughter of the family lying in a pile of debris, partly sheltered by the angle of a broken roof,” according to Jessie. Marion was 27 months old and definitely not a newborn baby as depicted in the Frank Slide myths. The three girls were taken to an undamaged home and given other children’s clothes to wear. A stranger told them their parents and four brothers were dead, and their uncle Archibald Leitch was coming from Cranbrook to take them back with him. Archie Continued on Page 12
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